Jirdes Winther Baxter, last survivor of 1925 Nome serum run, dies in Juneau at 101
Jirdes Winther Baxter, the last living survivor of the 1925 serum run credited with inspiring the Iditarod Sled Dog Race, died Monday at Bartlett Regional Hospital at the age of 101.
"This is kind of an end of an era for that period of time," Fred Baxter, one of her sons, said in an interview Tuesday.
His mother, born Jirdes Winther on Feb. 25, 1924, to parents who had moved from Norway to Nome, was hospitalized with diphtheria on Jan. 31, 1925, in the midst of an epidemic of the disease that winter. Only a few days earlier, Nome’s only doctor, Curtis Welch, sent an emergency telegraph to the U.S. Public Health Service requesting 1 million units of diphtheria antitoxin.
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